Basic, but crucial, Matlab syntax question

[Xan]

i did use a 3rd party matrix package in the end actually. still pretty slow though. and £50 is waaay to much for my budget

[tlr]

http://www.octave.org/

freeware, very matlab compatible.

true, but not very useful on windows even if there's a cygwin version.

A good tip for this is to keep an old computer as linux server. I have a linux server in a cupboard that runs Debian. I use it for of Octave/scripting/internet stuff. For example it runs our 'intranet', so I can easily tweak php/mysql stuff at home. Also it contains (by default) a lot of documentation for these tools.

I should also mention scipy which is a scientific extension to python and can thus run on every plateform.
http://www.scipy.org/

and there's a windows distribution of python which has it buit-in:
http://www.enthought.com/
as well as many useful python extension like wxPython or VTK

Never heard of this. Will check it out!

/Daniel